Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

Response: Like any study of this kind a whole lot depends upon the questions that are asked.

Looking at the survey I would say that all it really proves is that those that are better educated can better answer the list of questions that the Pew researchers came up with. My conclusion is that education is probably the major determining factor here and not ones faith or lack thereof. The study also shows that College grads beat out everyone else.

It is no accident that the top people of faith in this survey are Jews and Mormons, two religions that emphasize education in their culture and whose adherents are better educated than the average. The same could be said about atheists and agnostics.